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Gone With the Wind

By Dean Robinson July 13, 2011 4:49 pmJuly 13, 2011 4:49 pm

George Steinmetz

“This matter is best disposed of from a great height, over water.” I hear that line from “North by Northwest” when I see George Steinmetz’s images from this year’s Défi Wind competition off the coast of Gruissan, France. When one of them ran in last weekend’s magazine, Steinmetz became the first photographer to make a repeat appearance in “Look.” Back in early March, Steinmetz’s picture taken from high over frozen water — the setting for a pond hockey tournament in Wisconsin — marked the debut of “Look” as a regular feature. Here, above and below, are some additional photos from his windsurfing shoot.

Sport is motion, and one of photography’s boons is to bring it to a stop, to show us what we missed when things were going on. The bird’s-eye view that someone like Steinmetz provides — see this description of how he works, then check out some of his work for National Geographic — has the added virtue of letting us take in events whose scale is too large for spectators on-site (or participants) to see more than a glimpse of. Bicycle tours. Marathons. Open-ocean sailing races and windsurfing armadas.

But that line from “North by Northwest” comes with shadows. It’s spoken, after all, by Vandamm, the villain played by James Mason, who is describing how he means to finish off the Eva Marie Saint character. (By dropping her in a lake, I guess, since they’re in the middle of the country.) At the risk of sounding too dramatic, I have the sense that windsurfing may be slowly suffering a similar fate. As my friend Peter put it, when I asked him recently about his windsurfing: “I only went twice last summer. The sport is dying. Kite-boarding is killing it.”

He’s no sports-industry expert. But there’s (some) evidence to support his claim. This “Recreation Statistics Update” from the Forest Service, for example. Over a five-year period, from 1999 to 2004, windsurfing ranked dead last among some 80 American recreational pursuits. While nearly 10 percent of the population in 2004 said it jet-skied, less than 2 percent windsurfed. Meanwhile, more than 4 percent did something called “anadromous fishing.” (That seems to be what bears do in rivers. I had to look it up, too.)

Another, more recent survey, from the University of Georgia, shows the change in participation rates in 60 recreational activities between 1999 and 2008. The only diversions that saw a greater drop-off in the number of participants than windsurfing (a 19.1 percent decline) were ice-skating outdoors (-21.3 percent), snowmobiling (-29.7 percent) and cross-country skiing (-39.2 percent). (But of course! Those are your global warming victims. You’d think that climate change, though, with its intensified weather, might fill the sails of a few more windsurfers.) On the other hand, there’s been a nice uptick in the number of people who “Gather mushrooms, berries, etc.”

I wanted to be a windsurfer once. Not the sort who races in France, but simply the able-to-turn-this-damn-thing-around kind, the “no thank you, I don’t need you to tow me back to shore” kind. A couple of decades ago, I visited a lake in New England over several summers. Windsurfing boards floated at buoys, and there were people around willing to show you how to use them. The man who would become my uncle-in-law even brought his own from several states away. I counted on eventually getting the hang of the sport — the same way you figure you’ll learn this or that foreign language, or master this or that martial art — but it wasn’t to be. Maybe if I’d lived near Columbia Gorge in Oregon, or on the Outer Banks in North Carolina. I’ve been back to that New England lake a couple of times in recent summers, and the windsurfing boards are gone. The uncle-in-law brings a kayak instead.

Anyone up for some jet-skiing? Or a ride in one of those powerboats right below? I think I can get back to shore that way.

Bruce Grierson wrote this week’s cover story about Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who has conducted experiments that involve manipulating environments to turn back subjects’ perceptions of their own age.Read more…